Alex Kotlowitz’s article in today’s New York Times magazine section (“Blocking the Transmission of Gun Violence”) about CeaseFire and its founder, Dr. Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist by training who believes one can combat violence by treating it like a disease, sent my mind reeling. Slutkin’s theory is that “violence directly mimics infections like tuburculosis and AIDS, and so…the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to thse diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source.” I must admit that I’m a bit of an epidemophile: for whatever reason, I have a preternatural interest in all things disease-, transmission-, and response-oriented. (Criteria for such an affliction: spend your last vacation devouring Steven Johnson’s enthralling Ghost Map, about the 1854 London Cholera epidemic, or recommend Douglas Preston’s utterly terrifying The Hot Zone, about the horrifyingly emergent Ebola virus, for friends suffering from insomnia, on the theory they won’t be able to sleep after they read it anyway!)

from the CeaseFire website

Thus Kotlowitz’s article about Slutkin’s epidemiological approach to violence struck a chord. In the epidemiology of disease, there is always an “index case“—the first case on record. In violence, there is a precipitating event. And, just like an epidemic, the intensity of transmission amplifies throughout the population: a particularly vociferous antagonist can result in tens of crimes, never mind an asymmetric number of shootings and homicides. Enter CeaseFire, an organization which seeks to interrupt violence at its first, most critical step: what epidemiologists would cause “index case transmission”—when the first victim becomes motivated aggressor.

And, just as public health deals with the results of infection (i.e., sick people who become patients), so the results of unchecked transmission of the disease of violence are higher crime rates, an ever-increasing rate of youth-involved gun violence within the otherwise fixed homicide rate, and an exploding prison population. As my colleague Pascal Levensohn recently summarized, the prison population of the US might as well be its own nation. They are the victims of a disease just as surely as were the nineteenth century’s leper colonies: shunned by society, the very definition of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Fortunately, organizations like CeaseFire and PAX, about which I wrote previously in “A PAX on Gun Violence”, understand that ostracism of those infected with this disease isn’t the answer. Recognizing that the ounce of gun violence prevention created by these worthy organization is worth far more than its proverbial pound of cure (actually, that was Benjamin Franklin), both PAX and CeaseFire appear to understand that nipping violence in the bud requires intervention before the disease spreads.

ShotSpotter systems are deployed nationwide (we now protect 29 cities and just under 100 square miles of the US), and they detect an average of as 80 gunshot incidents a night at this time of year (the number increases to perhaps 150+ per night during the peak summer season). So by now we’re pretty used to helping police and prosecutors piece together the details of incidents: where specific shots were fired, what the precise time line was, even who shot first. And, by now, we’ve gotten a fair amount of press about the fact that our systems help police do their jobs more safely and efficiently.

But every once in a while, a particular incident surpasses even our expectations. Such was the case in the sad case of DeOnté Rawlings, the 14 year-old Washington, DC resident who was killed after a gun battle with police officers in September, 2007. There was some confusion at the scene, because the weapon which the officers reported Rawlings fired at them was missing after a crowd surrounded the scene immediately following the incident. ShotSpotter’s evidence has been crucial in this case, as several Washington Post articles confirm. As the Post previously reported, ShotSpotter sensors corroborate the officers’ report that the first shot fired did not come from the officer’s gun but from a heavier caliber weapon. Today’s article reports that the US Attorney’s office, after interviewing 42 witnesses and reviewing all the forensic evidence (including ShotSpotter’s) have decided not to pursue Federal charges against either article, concluding “our judgment was there was no evidence of a crime. The officers had an actual and reasonable fear and the acts that they took were in response to that fear.”

There simply aren’t words to express my profound sadness at this event. But all of us at ShotSpotter are deeply gratified to know that we could assist in the process of shedding some light on what happened, and in helping a grieving city begin to heal.

The first entry in this series provided data on just how bad gun violence is in the US and highlighted a tremendous opportunity for improvement.

About a year or so ago, I was lucky enough to meet Dan Gross, the co-founder and CEO of PAX, a New York-based organization which has developed two truly innovative programs which reduce gun violence long before anybody ever fires a weapon. A former advertising executive, Dan found his life changed forever when his brother became the innocent victim of gun violence himself: his younger brother Matthew was critically wounded in the now infamous 1997 shooting on the observation deck of New York’s iconic Empire State Building. Leaving his lucrative advertising career behind, Dan has since become first the leader of PAX and then the creator of two important programs.

One of these programs, Speak Up, addresses the reality that many school shootings are avoidable. According to the US government, over 1,000,000 students take some kind of weapon to school at least once a month. Moreover, over 80% of school attacker tell someone of their plans before they execute them. In other words, in four out of five cases, friends of the perpetrators−often themselves students in the very schools which will later fall victim to gun violence−have heard rumors, threats, innuendo, or otherwise have reason to suspect the perpetrators may turn to guns to settle their grievances. Although it seems obvious that a “hotline,” reminiscent of suicide prevention hotlines, should be created for kids to report such threats anonymously, it turns out not to be quite so simple. There are both legal and procedural complications inherent in accepting anonymous tips regarding minors. Enter Speak Up! Thanks to a 24/7 hotline at 866-Speak-Up and numerous educational and support materials, students now have a safe an anonymous resource on which they can rely. Perhaps equally importantly, PAX has spent the time and money to develop a carefully-calibrated protocol which is endorsed by national law enforcement and educators’ organizations.

The second program, called ASK, encourages parents to ask if the homes which their children visit to play contain firearms. Why? Because a shocking 1.7 million children in the US live in homes with weapons which are both loaded and unlocked. In 2003, nearly eight children and teens were killed by firearms every single day. And in 2004, a horrifying 37 children and teens were injured by firearms every single day. With 40% of children living in households containing firearms, it’s not unreasonable for parents to ask: “Are there any guns where my children are playing?” (As aside: neither I nor, it seems, PAX, have any objection to properly licensed and secured—i.e., locked—firearms. This is not a gun control issue. This is a safety issue.) This year, on June 21st (the first day of summer), communities nationwide will recognize ASK Day, a day to focus on asking a simple question which can save kids’ lives.

If you have a moment, browse over to the PAX website and learn a little bit more. Find out how you can help. Every time these two PAX programs succeeds in reducing an incident of gun violence—even if that eliminates an opportunity for a ShotSpotter-assisted arrest—I, for one, will feel our society has taken a step in the right direction.

My day job exposes me to a grim reality: gun violence remains a constant threat across our country. My perspective into this world is somewhat limited, as I see it most regularly through the window afforded by the just under 100 square miles of the US covered by ShotSpotter systems (a small, fraction of the country’s 10,000+ urban square miles, let alone its 3.8 million over all square miles). But even within that narrow perspective, the numbers are shocking: within the areas covered by ShotSpotter systems, we detected more than 80 separate shooting incidents on the average evening in March; if this year is anything like last year, that number will increase to more than 200 per evening in July and August. Using some data from Americans for Gun Safety, I came up with the following frightening map:

Gun violence has become not only the tool of murderers but the tool of intimidators, and thus it is becoming all the more prevalent. One city in which our technology is deployed, for example, suffered 100 murders last year. There were another 300-500 people wounded by gunfire. But in that same city, over that year, we detected more than 3,000 incidents of gunfire. All of this in a city in which it is illegal to fire a weapon outdoors within city limits (unless, of course, one is at a licensed shooting range). It is safe to assume this approximately one-in-ten ratio is not the result of preternaturally poor aim on the part of those shooting the weapons. Nor is it anything to be happy about. As these data indicate, guns are fired illegally just as often for purposes other than to kill someone. So one need not only be concerned about murders and hard-core felons. We also need to worry about the people who fire guns for the sake of intimidation, to “mark territory,” or simply because it’s fun.

The solution to our nation’s gun violence problem does not lie solely in technology such as ShotSpotter. Naturally, as the company’s CEO I am inclined to recommend the technology as a reliable mechanism to reduce gun crime (in fact, ShotSpotter systems have been proven to reduce gunfire and violent crime), but that’s not the point of this posting. The sad reality is that, by the time ShotSpotter finds out about a crime, society as a whole has missed the opportunity to prevent that crime from happening in the first place. Around the office, we can occasionally be heard saying that ShotSpotter can’t help put the bullets back in the gun. Nor can we stop the gun from being fired. But what if somebody could? Therein lies a tremendous opportunity.

The next post in this series: capitalizing on that tremendous opportunity

For the past few weeks, I’ve been at the mercy of an unfortunate bug in the initial release of WordPress 2.5 (specifically, the 2.5.0 release) which rendered me utterly unable to post.  Proving once again that one should never trust the dot-zero release of any software product, I struggled through three weeks of support forum postings only to find that, in the end, WordPress needed to fix the problem themselves.  (For those interested in the techy details:  something in WordPress 2.5.0 broke a single line of JavaScript in TinyMCE, the rich text editor used by WordPress for creating posts.  And, no, this is not the you-need-to-turn-on-the-visual-editor “bug” which a few people were fooled by.)  Fortunately, the 2.5.1 release is out, and among other things it provides an upgraded version of the culprit component.  (TinyMCE is now at 3.0.7; the 3.x family, initially introduced in WordPress 2.5.0, is substantially upgraded from the 2.x series on which WordPress used to rely.)  For those who rely on Andrew Ozz’s very useful TinyMCE Advanced plug-in, you’ll want to download the 3.0.1.version which is compatible with WordPress 2.5.1 and TinyMCE 3.0.7.  It also adds an incredibly useful new feature:  finally, it allows you to control whether TinyMCE automatically tries to remove <P> and <BR> tags when saving.  (Here’s a hint:  if I wanted it to do that, I’d tell it to do that!)

So, we’re back on the air.  Stay tuned….

Proving once and for all that the storm pounding the Bay Area this weekend with hurricane-force winds is not only dangerous for the risk of flooding and hurtling objects but for the free time it affords all of us who like spending part of our weekends outdoors, I set my mind to doing something creative and, well, frivolous (at least that’s how it started). My frequent readers (all three of you will know that I’m something of a compulsive reader and book collector. I’ve taken to keeping track of my library using a combination of LibraryThing and Visual Bookshelf (more about why I use two in a little bit), and late last night I stumbled upon an interesting use for a collection of the images of the book covers in my library: building a photo mosaic. So, without further ado, here I am, in all my bibliophilic glory:

 

Yes, that’s a geeky thing to do. But it highlighted a few things about my changing “digital existence” that I thought were worth reporting:

So Much Data
First and foremost, all of this data (the books, the covers, and even the photo I turned into the mosaic) were available with a few minutes worth of work. Admittedly, I had previously spent hours scanning the ISBN bar codes on my books (conveniently when packing my books in order to move to my new apartment). But think about the amount of data available to me for very little investment: the titles, authors, and graphic images of 1,300 some-odd books, along with their associated meta-data (length, ISBN, etc.). When I was in school (ending in the mid ’90s), gathering and manipulating this sort of data was certainly possible, but doing so was the domain of database experts, programmers, and the like. So I became one of those, mostly because I saw the computer as a tool which would facilitate information manipulation of a nature never previously possible−or indeed imagined.
Trumbull College, My residential college at Yale, for example, had a library boasting some 5,000 works. Its card catalog was positively ancient and poorly maintained. Estimates for the workload involved in cataloging it and keeping it up-to-date were so substantial that the (volunteer) project never got off the ground. A mere fifteen years later, my catalog is not only mostly up-to-date, but it contains all manner of “rich content” that a card catalog could not muster: images of the covers, other books by the same author, publication history, and of course the meta-data: reviews, social/popularity information, and even feedstock for inference and recommendation engines.

Community Creativity
Then there is the accessibility of the inspiration. LibraryThing cleverly suggested the mosaic and linked to David Louis Edelman’s post in which he created a similar mosaic. Call it community scrapbooking, community arts and crafts, or simply community creativity, but this sort of cross-country “we all trade inspiration” is unusual, to say the least. To be sure, historically artist communes and even local arts and crafts fairs historically provided fodder and inspiration for our individual creativity, but this is a different kind of inspiration: it is both more instantaneous (I got the idea late last night; got a full night’s rest; and woke up and produced the mosaic before breakfast this morning) and more eclectic (David is a computer programmer and Science Fiction author in the Washington, DC area; I am a technology company CEO in Silicon Valley).

But Silos—Still
Unfortunately, it’s not all wine and roses. LibraryThing is the site I’ve always used to catalog my books, but recently Visual Bookshelf has won many converts, mostly because they have embraced the Facebook Platform API and have created a Facebook application. Since some 500 of my friends are on Facebook, and since many of them are avid readers, Visual Bookshelf has already netted me 40 some-odd “reading buddies” (which I define as other people I am friends with on Facebook and who have Visual Bookshelf profiles). An 8% cross-over rate isn’t bad, especially when you consider that Visual Bookshelf is only one of hundreds of Facebook applications. (And, for that matter, it’s one of the least annoying, since it doesn’t spam the hell out of your friends.) Here, for example, is my bookshelf, as displayed on Facebook, and what my friends are reading:

Unfortunately, I cannot synchronize my book activity on Visual Bookshelf with my LibraryThing account. Visual Bookshelf finally implemented a LibraryThing import feature, but it’s unidirectional. Likewise, Facebook makes it nearly impossible to export friend information (going so far as to display email addresses as images to foil screen scrapers and other brute force export tools). So I’m stuck maintaining two databases and importing one to the other, potentially over-writing or losing information each time I do so.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem, and it is but one example of the growing “problem” of social networking data living in proprietary silos. Such well-known Web 2.0 commentators as Om Malik have even gone so far as to propose that social networking features will end up getting built into most desktop and web software, much the same way as the Cut/Copy/Paste mechanism has become a de facto paradigm standard. But that will only work if the core social networking information (who is who and who knows whom) does not remain the proprietary information of, e.g., Facebook. Technologies from the simple XFN to the ambitious OpenSocial are supposed to fix that, but OpenSocial appears almost to have been promulgated by Google to compete with Facebook, and it will be a chilly day in the netherworld before Facebook adopts it. More recently, the DataPortability Working Group has been graced by the participation of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others (or at least representatives from those companies). But until something concrete develops, we early adopters will continue to enjoy the benefits of So Much Data and Community Creativity, but only if we’re willing to put up with duplicate data, lost data, and the other assorted horrors of manual synchronization.

All told, the information revolution continues in directions we never could have anticipated. Here I am trading notes with friends I haven’t physically seen in over a decade, enjoying better book recommendations from the wisdom of my friends (and the crowds) than I do by poking around my local bookstore, and finding a nice Sunday morning arts and crafts project inspired by a Washington, DC science fiction author whom I’ve never met.

Now if only I didn’t have to keep three copies of it all!

I haven’t written much about EcoBroker, my brother’s company. John, who earned his Ph.D. in Ecology from UC Davis (but did much of his research down at UC Berkeley), and who was the government’s senior liaison between the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the DOE (Department of Energy), has spent the past decade and a half incubating environmentally-friendly businesses from his offices in Evergreen, CO. Each has had its unique character and unique successes, but EcoBroker is a run-away hit. From its strategic high ground at the convergence of the growing consumer demand for all things green and the long-viable (if somewhat sleepy, the CDO/subprime crisis notwithstanding) residential real estate business, EcoBroker has capitalized not only on the desire of consumers to buy smarter, but also to take control of their environmental footprint. (In fact, in a recent survey of house-buying consumers, 90% said that environmental responsibility was something for which they would select when buying a house.)

If the recent press coverage of EcoBroker in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or Newsweek didn’t get your attention, then perhaps this excellent television interview with Brother John will. (For the record, he’s the good-looking one in the family!)

Click To Play For most consumers, the single biggest financial investment they will make in their lives will be their primary residence. It thus follows that if those consumers want to have an environmentally-positive impact, they should look not just to their incidental purchases (”would you like paper or plastic today?”) but to their largest purchase in order to effect their environmental responsibility. Go find an EcoBroker, pick a responsible and efficient house, and make a difference with every mortgage payment!

Having just returned from my first vacation in a very long time—and some much-needed Spanish practice—I thought I’d share some photographs. I was visiting Key Biscayne and South Beach (Miami Beach), Florida (and managed to leave one day into Florida’s recent wicked cold spell). I’ll spare you the beach photos and substitute a tour of the local fauna (and a little flora, for good measure):

One slightly sad point: the beautiful iguanas (green iguanas to be precise) you see above are the target of serious resident-led zoocide (hereptocide?). Evidently, these beautiful and utterly harmless but nonetheless exogenous creatures leave droppings in inconvenient places, and this causes them to attract the ire of local residents. (They come out around 11:00am every day to sun themselves and raise their body temperatures; they generally head “home” around 3:00pm.) At least for this tourist, getting a chance to see a few “wild” iguanas while I was relaxing was a lot of fun, and I can’t imagine why anybody would begrudge them their sun-bathing. Bah Humbug!

Every once in a while, a YouTube video gets my attention, as this one has. In the week since its posting, it has begun to go viral, with something on the order of 700,000 viewings. For those of us working in the Tech Industry—especially those of us in Silicon Valley and in the Tech Industry—it pretty much tells the whole story:

**GRINCH UPDATE 12/18: Some militant copyright holder has filed a DMCA Takedown request with YouTube, so this wonderful piece of (IMO) fair use parody was temporarily unavailable. Fortunately, Matt Hempey has created version 1.1, which went online this evening**

**GRINCH UPDATE 12/18: Some militant copyright holder has filed a DMCA Takedown request with YouTube, so this wonderful piece of (IMO) fair use parody was temporarily unavailable. Fortunately, Matt Hempey has created version 1.1, which went online this evening**

As I poked around YouTube to see what other bits of cynical commentary I could find, I found that the group which created this little gem, The Richter Scales, has been busy singing their unique sharp commentary for a while. Check out this equally funny piece (which hasn’t quite gone viral—34,000 views since September) about the sub-prime debt melt-down:

This particular one strikes a chord (sorry :-)) because the song on which it is based, “There’s a Fine, Fine Line (Between Love and a Waste of Time)” from Avenue Q, was written by my friend and college classmate, Bobby Lopez, who just might just be the youngest composer to win a Tony Award for best score, which he and collaborator Jeff Marx shared in 2004 for Avenue Q. The world is, indeed small.

And it gets smaller.

With a little more poking, I discovered that The Richter Scales are based right here in San Francisco. They’re quite the motley crew of former a cappella singers from various universities. Naturally, since my alma mater has something of an a cappella “problem” (15 singing groups on one campus will do that), I figured I might find a few, and, sure enough, there’s friend Nils Erdmann, a year ahead of me and a member of the elite Senior mens group the Yale Whiffenpoofs. A cappella singing was maybe the highlight of my undergraduate experience, and my group, Out of the Blue, is still going strong—some would say stronger, now that that my voice is but a distant memory!—and celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year. With some 200 or so alumni, there will be a run on hotel rooms in New Haven for the event….)

And now it comes full circle: A cappella singing seems to be somewhat addictive for those of us who indulged in it in college, and just the other night, an old friend from school asked me if I’d sing background on a project her band was working on. Little did I know the evidence would be caught on tape—complete with a street-side serenade and the resultant reaction from our Mission crowd:

And now for the clincher: The Richter Scales have quite the sense of humor (as witness their great “I Hate A Cappella”), but they’re even tougher on the Tech industry. Earlier this year, they were nominated for a CARA award (by CASA, the Contemporary A capella Society of America, who else?) for “I’ve Got Mail”.

Enjoy.**If the Grinch lets you.**